How is your memory faring in this era of information overload? Mine is frankly struggling with all I have to remember running a business, teaching communications to mid-level executives, and managing one non-profit and helping with another one. I know, I brought those things on myself, right? So, no pity. But my sense of feeling overwhelmed is similar to yours, I’m sure, whatever your to-do list.

Our hybrid world brings information to us faster and faster, and if our in-box is not overloaded at one moment, the news and information cycle is.  We are paleolithic beings trying to exist in a modern world of our own creation that has long since outrun its creators.  Take numbers, for example.  How many times a day do you have to remember a string of numbers with a brain developed in that paleolithic era, when you could count most things with your fingers?  And any number bigger than that was just ‘a lot’?  Today, we have to regurgitate 6- and 8-digit numbers for dual-factor authentication multiple times a day, and don’t even get me started on credit cards, invoice numbers, record locators, membership data, ID information, social security numbers, and anything to do with the medical world.

OK, enough of the doom and gloom.  I do have some good news for you.  Neuroscientists and psychologists have been feeling mentally overloaded too, and they’ve studied ways to improve your recall.  Here are five of the most entertaining and fun ways to make your memory work better in the digital era – and a few for luck — as well as one thing not to do.  Follow these tricks to make the digital era more manageable for yourself.

Repeat out loud

Repeating information to another person whether that person is listening or not seems to help your recall.  Maybe we just warm to the sound of our own voices?  My next research project is to try this out on my cat.  Since they never listen, anyway, they are perfect candidates for experimentation.

Draw what you learn

Drawing pictures of words and concepts you are trying to remember helps you recall what you’ve sketched.  And here’s the really good news:  you don’t have to be any good at all at drawing.  Just scribble something that gets your visual, motor, and semantic memories going all at once.  Any doodle will do.  And the researchers tested doodling against other encoding strategies, as the psychologists call remembering, and doodling is best.  Weirdly, it’s even better than taking notes.

So, get out your pencils and get started!

Tell yourself it’s important

This is my favorite trick.  If I just say to myself, “this is important, Nick,” when I’m trying to remember something, I am more likely to recall it later.  Simply telling yourself that something is important to remember will work for you, too.  Remember to use your own name.

The truly odd aspect of this technique is that it works better than emotional power.  In other words, we tend to remember events that have big emotional impacts on us.  But simply telling yourself to remember works better than, say, getting married, or breaking your leg.

Take a short nap

For some reason, your nap needs to be less than an hour, but as long as it comes in under the limit, it can improve your recall by 5 times.  So, no need to be defensive about that urge to shut your eyes, just for a moment, in the longueurs of the afternoon at work.  It’s all good – and good for you.  Tell the boss I said so.

Breathe in through the nose

And here’s one anyone can do – even the nap-phobics reading this.  Just breathe in through your nose.  Easy enough?  Yep, breathing in through the nose apparently helps your memory perform better because inhaling stimulates the brain.  Mouth breaking doesn’t work, so keep your mouth shut.

And finally, a few other favorites from the research:  if you drink coffee after learning something, you are more likely to remember it.  If you smell natural oils during sleep, you are 200 times more likely to remember things you learned before bed.  And of course, eating fiber and taking regular exercise improve memory too, just as they improve everything else.

Last of all, a no-no:  don’t take a picture of the thing you are trying to remember.  If you do, your brain will file it in your “pictures I’ve taken” mental file, which is already overstuffed with all those selfies, rather than the “significant thing to remember” mental file.  So, using your cell-phone camera will indeed create a patchy memory, just as we all fear.  Put the phone away!

And good luck navigating our modern world.