If you want to know how to improve memory, start with the habits that decide whether information gets stored at all: enough sleep, testing yourself instead of rereading, spacing your review across days, and giving one task your full attention. None of them need supplements or brain-training games, and each one has been measured in controlled studies.
Most memory complaints are not about a weak brain. They come from studying tired, rereading notes that feel familiar, cramming the night before, and splitting attention between a lecture and a phone. Those are habits, and habits can change.
Below are nine ways to improve memory that hold up in the research, what each one does to the way you store and retrieve information, and how to fit it into a normal week of classes or work. The first three do most of the heavy lifting, so start there if you only change one thing.
How to Improve Memory Starts With Why It Fails
Memory works in three stages. Encoding is the moment information enters your head, consolidation is the slower process that stabilizes it, and retrieval is pulling it back out when you need it. Forgetting can happen at any of the three.
That matters because each habit below targets a specific stage. Sleep supports encoding and consolidation. Self-testing and spaced review strengthen retrieval. Single-tasking and stress control protect encoding, the stage most people never think about.
It also explains why effort alone often fails. You can spend three hours with a textbook and remember little of it if you were tired, distracted, and rereading the same pages. The time was real; the encoding was weak.
Forgetting itself is normal and fast. Ebbinghaus showed over a century ago that unreviewed material fades steeply in the first days, a pattern explained in our guide to the forgetting curve. The goal is not to stop forgetting, which is impossible, but to make the right things harder to lose.
1. Protect Your Sleep Before and After Learning
Sleep is the habit people trade away first, and it is the one memory depends on most.
In a 2007 study from Harvard Medical School, Seung-Schik Yoo, Matthew Walker and colleagues kept volunteers awake for one night and then asked them to learn new material. The sleep-deprived group showed a significant drop in hippocampal activity while learning and retained less afterward. Summarizing that work, Walker's review of sleep and memory reports that sleep deprivation imposed a 40% reduction in the ability to form new memories compared with rested participants.
Sleep before learning prepares your brain to take in new information, and sleep after learning helps lock it in. An all-nighter attacks both at once.
In practice, this means a few concrete changes. Study demanding material earlier in the evening rather than at 2 a.m., when encoding is weakest. Treat the night before an exam as part of your preparation, not as extra study time. If you have to choose between one more hour of review and one more hour of sleep, the research favors sleep more often than students expect.
Naps count too. A short rest after a heavy learning session gives consolidation a head start, especially if your night sleep was short.
2. Test Yourself Instead of Rereading
This is the most important tip on the list. If you change one habit, change this one.
Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke had students study prose passages, then either restudy them or take free-recall tests on them. When the final test came five minutes later, the restudy group did better. When it came two days or one week later, prior testing produced substantially greater retention than studying. The surprising part: repeated studying made students more confident, even though they remembered less. Their paper on test-enhanced learning concludes that testing improves learning, not just measures it.
Pulling information out of memory is what makes it stick, while reading it again only makes it feel familiar.
You can apply this without formal tests. Close your notes and write down everything you remember about a topic, then check what you missed. Turn headings into questions. Use flashcards and answer before you flip them. Our guide to active recall techniques covers more formats.
The hard part is making the questions. Primo Notes can generate a quiz and flashcards from a recorded lecture, a PDF or a YouTube video, so the time you would spend writing questions goes into answering them instead.
3. Space Your Review Across Days
Five hours of study in one evening feels productive. The same five hours spread across a week works better.
The evidence for this is unusually broad. A 2006 meta-analysis by Nicholas Cepeda, Harold Pashler and colleagues pooled 839 assessments of distributed practice from 317 experiments in 184 articles. They found that the gap between study sessions and the time until the final test work together: the further away the test, the longer the ideal gap between reviews.
Short gaps help you remember for a few days; longer gaps help you remember for months.
A simple version of spaced review looks like this. Study new material, then revisit it the next day, again a few days later, and again a week after that. Each review should be a retrieval attempt from habit 2, not a reread. If something comes back easily, push the next review further out. If it does not, bring it closer.
Spacing also fights the forgetting curve directly. Each review catches the material just as it starts to fade, and each successful recall makes the next drop shallower.
The catch is that spacing requires planning. You cannot space review for an exam that starts tomorrow, so the habit pays off most when it starts in the first week of a course, not the last.
4. Do One Thing at a Time
If you study with a phone face up, a chat open and music with lyrics, you are paying a memory cost even when you feel focused.
Melina Uncapher, Anthony Wagner and colleagues at Stanford compared heavy and light media multitaskers on memory tasks. Their study of media multitasking found that heavy multitaskers showed lower working memory performance whether or not distractions were present, and lower working memory predicted lower long-term memory later. The authors linked this to a wider, more impulsive scope of attention that lets irrelevant information compete with what you are trying to learn.
The study is correlational, so it does not prove that multitasking causes weaker memory. It does show that the two travel together, and that the effect reaches past the moment of distraction.
Working memory is the gateway to long-term memory, and divided attention narrows that gateway.
This is also the most practical answer to how to improve short-term memory. Put your phone in another room, not just on silent. Close tabs you are not using. Work in blocks of 25 to 50 minutes with real breaks in between, and use the breaks for the messages you were tempted to check.
5. Move Your Body Regularly
Exercise is often sold as a memory booster. The real evidence is promising, but more modest than the headlines.
In a randomized trial with 120 older adults, Kirk Erickson and colleagues found that a year of aerobic exercise increased the size of the anterior hippocampus by 2%, while a stretching control group lost 1.4%. The hippocampus is central to forming new memories, so this was widely reported as exercise improving memory.
The memory results were less clear. Both groups improved on the memory test over the year, and critics pointed out in a published response that the difference between groups was small. A separate study of 75 young adults found that higher aerobic fitness was associated with better performance on a demanding memory discrimination task, though that design shows association rather than cause.
Treat exercise as long-term maintenance for the brain systems memory relies on, not as a study hack for next week.
What this means for you: regular aerobic activity, such as brisk walking, cycling or running, is a reasonable habit with broad health benefits and some evidence for brain structure. A walk between study blocks also doubles as a break from screens, which supports habit 4. Just do not expect a single workout to rescue a weak study method.
6. Keep Stress Away From Study and Test Time
Stress does not hurt memory evenly. Its effect depends on when it hits.
A 2017 meta-analysis led by Grant Shields at the University of California, Davis, combined 113 studies with 6,216 participants. It found that acute stress before or during learning generally impaired memory, and stress just before or during retrieval impaired it too, more so for emotional material. Stress shortly after learning sometimes improved memory, as long as it happened in the same context as the material.
The two moments to protect are when you study and when you need to recall.
For studying, that means not starting a session straight after a stressful call or argument. Give yourself ten minutes to settle first. For exams, presentations and interviews, it means arriving early, skipping the panicked last-minute cram in the hallway, and using slow breathing to bring your heart rate down before you start.
Chronic stress is a bigger problem than a single bad day, and it deserves attention in its own right. If memory slips are constant and come with poor sleep and low mood, that is worth raising with a doctor rather than solving with study techniques.
7. Explain It in Your Own Words
Material you can explain is material you have actually understood, and understood material is easier to retrieve.
In their large 2013 review of learning techniques, John Dunlosky and colleagues rated elaborative interrogation and self-explanation as moderate-utility strategies. Elaborative interrogation means asking yourself why a fact is true. Self-explanation means describing how a new idea connects to what you already know, or how you got from one step of a problem to the next.
Both work because they force you to build connections. A fact attached to three other things you know has three routes back into memory. A fact memorized alone has one.
If you cannot explain something simply, you have found exactly what to review next.
You can practice this alone by talking through a topic out loud as if teaching a friend, or by writing a short explanation without looking at your notes. Study partners help, since their questions expose gaps you skip over.
Primo Notes has a Feynman mode built for this: you explain the material out loud, and the app asks follow-up questions on the parts your explanation missed. It turns a solo study session into something closer to being questioned by a tutor.
8. Stop Relying on Highlighting and Rereading
Some of the most popular study habits do surprisingly little for memory.
The same review by Dunlosky and colleagues rated practice testing and distributed practice as high utility. It gave a low utility rating to five common techniques: summarization, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery for text learning and rereading. In the review on effective learning techniques, the authors note that some of these help some students on some tasks, but the conditions are limited.
Rereading and highlighting feel productive because the material grows familiar. Familiarity is not recall, as the Roediger and Karpicke study showed, so these habits can leave you confident and underprepared at the same time.
You do not need to drop these tools completely; you need to stop treating them as the main event.
A few direct swaps keep the comfort while adding the part that works:
- Instead of rereading a chapter, read it once, close it, and write down what you remember.
- Instead of highlighting a sentence, write a question in the margin that the sentence answers.
- Instead of summarizing with the book open, summarize from memory and then check.
9. Capture Everything So Your Attention Can Go to Understanding
Trying to write down every word of a fast lecture or meeting splits your attention in the same way multitasking does. You end up with notes, but little memory of what the speaker meant.
A better split is to separate capture from processing. During the lecture or meeting, focus on following the argument and jot down only your own questions and connections. Let a recording handle the complete record. Afterward, work from the full material to build retrieval practice for habit 2 and a review schedule for habit 3.
Your attention is limited, so spend it on understanding and let a tool keep the record.
This is the workflow Primo Notes is built around. You record a lecture or meeting, and it returns a structured note and a formatted transcript, with speaker labels when several people talk. From there you can turn the note into flashcards or a quiz, so the processing step starts from a complete source rather than from patchy handwriting.
The same principle works without any app. Use the lecture slides as your record, keep your own notes for ideas and questions, and set aside fifteen minutes the same day to turn both into practice questions. What matters is that capture stops competing with comprehension.
How to Put These Habits Into a Weekly Routine
Nine habits at once is too many. Build them in layers, starting with the ones that carry the most weight.
- In the first week, fix sleep and replace one rereading session per day with a retrieval session.
- In the second week, add spaced review: revisit each new topic the next day and again later in the week.
- In the third week, protect one daily study block from your phone and add a short explanation out loud at the end of it.
Exercise and stress management fit around these rather than replacing them. A walk between study blocks covers both, and a calm start before each session protects encoding.
Track one simple measure: how much you can recall about a topic before you look at your notes. When that number goes up week by week, the habits are working.
Conclusion
Improving memory is less about talent and more about the conditions you learn in. Sleep protects both the formation and the consolidation of new memories. Testing yourself beats rereading once more than a few minutes have passed, and spacing your review across days keeps information available for months instead of days.
Attention and stress shape what gets stored in the first place, so single-tasking and a calm start to each session matter more than they seem. Exercise supports the brain systems involved over the long run. Explaining ideas in your own words builds connections that make recall easier, while highlighting and rereading mostly build false confidence.
Start with sleep, self-testing and spaced review, then add the rest one layer at a time.
