Brain Fitness Tip of the Week: Stress

Focus on stress. Our own, and many other researchers’ work, has shown that stress has a negative relation to memory. Stress may affect how well you can pay attention, and the chemicals it increases in our body (sometimes called stress hormones) may have a negative impact on your body. Whatever the cause, stress has a negative effect on your ability to remember what you want to remember.

What to do? First, check out your stress level. Do you often feel tense, worried, and jumpy? Stress might be the reason. How often do you feel out of control, or as though events have gotten away from you? Those are the sorts of experiences that make for increased stress. People sometimes forget that we adapt to stressors, so that after some time we may not even notice how stressed we are.

Simple ways to control stress include mental “time outs,” relaxation, and exercise. Mental “time outs” mean simply taking a few minutes once or twice a day to shift gears. Stop the headlong rush through the day for just a few minutes. Do something else for 10 minutes, but be sure that you take a few seconds to breathe and mentally shift gears. Still better, practice relaxation for 15 minutes twice a day. Simply sit in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, and focus on relaxing the muscles of your body from your head to your feet. Finally, exercise five times a week. It doesn’t mean that you have to go to a gym and lift weights or train for a marathon. Just walking 30 minutes can make a difference

The most important things are to notice your stress level and make a plan for dealing with it. Your memory will thank you.

Self-Efficacy

I recently had the opportunity to teach a brain fitness class for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute on the Coral Gables campus of the University of Miami. As part of the class, we focused a great deal on memory since that is one of the things people were most interested in.

I had anticipated strong interest in the class, but not as much as we actually had. I had thought perhaps 15-20 people would come to the class the first day, but 60 persons came the first day. As part of their participation, I asked students to complete several questionnaires about how they felt about their memory abilities as well as administered a short memory test. We did the same measures at the end of the class.

A striking finding in previous research is that memory self-efficacy is strongly related to actually memory abilities. This term refers to the extent to which you believe you have control over how your memory works and can cope with challenges. Sure enough, in our Osher class, we found that students’ memory self-efficacy was related to how well they performed on a memory class. That leaves two possibilities: people who have good memories have high levels of memory self-efficacy, or that people with high levels of self-efficacy have good memories.

Which is it? Other studies have shown that people with higher levels of self-efficacy respond better to memory training. I think the chances are that the answer to the question is one or the other, but both. Having memory problems may make you feel less well able to control your memory, but feeling as though you understand and control your memory may make you better able to cope with challenges to your memory.

How can you improve your memory self-efficacy? The short answer is to learn more about how your memory works and develop realistic expectations for yourself about how your memory should work. I like a book called The Memory Workbook by DJ Mason, ML Kohn, and KA Clark (New Harbinger, 2001). The participants in our memory class really liked it, and it includes a number of exercises that you can work through on your own.