To help your brain preserve memories, two of the most powerful steps are:

  1. keep revisiting what matters to you, and
  2. support your brain with healthy, consistent habits like sleep, movement, and focus.

How memory sticks

  • Memories ā€œstickā€ when connections between neurons are repeatedly activated and strengthened, a process often called synaptic plasticity.
  • The brain is more likely to preserve information that is repeated, meaningful, or emotionally engaging, especially when stress is moderate rather than overwhelming.

Step 1: Revisit and rehearse

  • When you recall a memory, tell the story, or use a skill again, you reinforce the neural pathways so the memory becomes easier to retrieve later.
  • Simple ways to do this include spaced review (coming back to something after hours or days), teaching it to someone else, or linking it to vivid images, locations (mind palace), or humor.

Step 2: Protect your brainā€™s ā€œhardwareā€

  • Regular physical activity boosts blood flow to the brain and is linked with sharper memory, especially when done most days of the week.
  • Good sleep, stress management, mentally challenging activities (reading, learning, puzzles), and minimizing chronic distractions give the brain the conditions it needs to encode and store memories reliably.

Extra quick tips

  • Focus on one thing at a time when you want to remember it; multitasking makes encoding much weaker.
  • Attach emotion and personal meaningā€”journaling, photos, and talking about experiences can all help your brain tag a memory as important enough to keep.

TL;DR: The best ā€œcouple of stepsā€ are to actively revisit what you want to remember and to consistently care for your brain with movement, sleep, and focused attention.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.