It was once believed that brain function peaked during early adulthood and then slowly declined, leading to lapses in memory and brain fog during your golden years. Now it’s known that our modern lifestyle plays a significant role in contributing to cognitive decline, which is why exposure to toxins, chemicals, poor diet, lack of sleep, stress and much more can hinder the functioning of your brain. The flip side is also true in that a healthy lifestyle can support your brain health and even encourage your brain to grow new neurons, a process known as neurogenesis. Your brain’s hippocampus — the memory center — is especially able to grow new cells. It’s now known that your hippocampus regenerates throughout your entire lifetime, even into your 90s, provided you give it the tools to do so. These “tools” are primarily lifestyle-based, which is wonderful news. You don’t need an expensive prescription medication or any medical procedure at all to boost your brain and your memory. You simply must try out the following tricks to improve your memory. 7 Lifestyle-Based Ways to Improve Your Memory 1. Eat right — The foods you eat — and don’t eat — play a crucial role in your memory. Fresh vegetables are essential, as are healthy fats and avoiding sugar. Research has shown daily sugar consumption impairs spatial memory and inhibits neurogenesis in the hippocampus.1 However, a high-fat, moderate-protein, low-net-carb ketogenic diet is crucial for protecting your brain health and preventing degeneration that can lead to Alzheimer’s. One of the most striking studies showing the effects of a high-fat/low-carb versus high-carb diets on brain health revealed that high-carb diets increase your risk of dementia by a whopping 89%, while high-fat diets lower the risk significantly.2 In my book, “Superfuel: Ketogenic Keys to Unlock the Secrets to Good Fats, Bad Fats, and Great Health,” cowritten with James DiNicolantonio, Pharm.D., we explain how the omega-3 fat DHA is an essential structural component of your brain and is found in high levels in your neurons. When your omega-3 intake is inadequate, your nerve cells become stiff and more prone to inflammation as the missing omega-3 fats are substituted with omega-6 instead. Once your nerve cells become rigid and inflamed, proper neurotransmission from cell to cell and within cells becomes compromised. Low DHA levels have been linked to memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease, and some studies suggest degenerative brain diseases may potentially be reversible with sufficient DHA.3,4 Coconut oil is another healthy fat for brain function. It contains medium-chain fats, also referred to as MCTs, which are converted into ketones, an excellent mitochondrial fuel. Researchers found that ketones may work as an alternative energy source for malfunctioning brain cells,5 which has been found to reduce symptoms in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. 2. Exercise — Exercise encourages your brain to work at optimum capacity by stimulating nerve cells to multiply, strengthening their interconnections and protecting them from damage. During exercise nerve cells release proteins known as neurotrophic factors. One in particular, called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), triggers numerous other chemicals that promote neural health and directly benefits cognitive functions, including learning. A 2010 study on primates published in Neuroscience revealed that regular exercise not only improved blood flow to the brain but also helped the monkeys learn new tasks twice as quickly as nonexercising monkeys. This is a benefit the researchers believe would hold true for people as well.6 Exercise improves both brain structure and function, with research showing it significantly increases hippocampal volume in older adults with probable mild cognitive impairment.7 To get the most out of your workouts, I recommend a comprehensive program that includes high-intensity exercise, strength training, stretching and core work, along with plenty of daily nonexercise movement. 3. Stop multitasking — Used for decades to describe the parallel processing abilities of computers, multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to simultaneously do as many things as possible, as quickly as possible. Ultimately, multitasking may slow you down, make you prone to errors and make you forgetful. The opposite of multitasking is mindfulness, which helps you achieve undistracted focus. Students who took a mindfulness class improved reading comprehension test scores and working memory capacity, as well as experienced fewer distracting thoughts.8 If you find yourself trying to complete five tasks at once, stop yourself and focus your attention back to the task at hand. If distracting thoughts enter your head, remind yourself that these are only “projections,” not reality, and allow them to pass by without stressing you out. You can then end your day with a 10- or 15-minute meditation session to help stop your mind from wandering and relax into a restful sleep. 4. Get a good night’s sleep — Research from Harvard indicates that people are 33% more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas after sleeping,9 but few realize that their performance has actually improved. Sleep is also known to enhance your memories and help you “practice” and improve your performance of challenging skills. The process of brain growth, or neuroplasticity, is believed to underlie your brain’s capacity to control behavior, including learning and memory. Plasticity occurs when neurons are stimulated by events, or information, from the environment. However, sleep and sleep loss modify the expression of several genes and gene products that may be important for synaptic plasticity. Furthermore, certain forms of long-term potentiation, a neural process associated with the laying down of learning and memory, can be elicited in sleep, suggesting synaptic connections are strengthened while you slumber. As you might suspect, this holds true for infants too, and research shows naps can give a boost to babies’ brainpower. Specifically, infants who slept in between learning and testing sessions had a better ability to recognize patterns in new information, which signals an important change in memory that plays an essential role in cognitive development.10 There’s reason to believe this holds true for adults, too, as even among adults, a mid-day nap was found to dramatically boost and restore