Understanding the Link and the Solutions for Smoking-Related Memory Loss

If you’ve been leaving behind your car keys or forgetting your loved one’s birthdays lately, you may want to take a good look at your lifestyle habits. An Arizona Alzheimer’s Consortium study revealed that smoking can negatively affect verbal recall and memory performance, especially in women. This finding is quite alarming, given that there are 34.2 adult smokers in the US whose cognitive performance may be affected by their smoking habits.

Fortunately, you can try various solutions to curb your smoking habits and enhance your memory. So if you want to improve your cognitive performance, here’s what you need to know about smoking’s negative impact on your memory:

Smoking’s Effect On Memory Performance

Chronic smoking alters the performance of your memory due to the tobacco content of cigarettes. In fact, a study on the ‘Negative Impact of Chronic Tobacco Smoking’ revealed that chronic tobacco smokers have significantly worse attention, memory, processing accuracy, and executive functions than non-smokers. The study highlighted that working memory is the most compromised among chronic tobacco smokers among all these cognitive functions. It's more difficult for smokers to retain information because they are less likely to block out irrelevant information and focus their selective attention on the present task at hand compared to their non-smoking counterparts. So while studies have shown that nicotine can improve one's memory, long-term exposure to tobacco can do the opposite effect on your attention and memory retention skills.

How to Alleviate Memory Loss Caused by Tobacco Smoking

Quit tobacco through nicotine replacement therapy
Tobacco smoking negatively impacts your cognitive performance, which is why the first step here is to quit the habit. But rather than going cold turkey, you can boost your memory and effectively stop the habit through nicotine replacement therapy products. One of the products you can try is nicotine patches because Syracuse states that nicotine patches can improve the attention, learning, and memory of adults based on several studies. These nicotine replacement therapy products also have no serious side effects on cigarette withdrawal, which is why more researchers are looking into their positive cognitive effects.

You can also enhance your memory by getting pure nicotine through pouches. The Rogue nicotine pouches are a very popular form of nicotine replacement therapy in the US because their products undergo an advanced stream extraction technology to extract nicotine and remove 100% of the tobacco content. Thanks to this process, you can use pouches to get the memory-boosting benefits of nicotine without getting affected by the adverse cognitive effects of tobacco. This makes it easier to quit the habit of tobacco smoking, while also reversing its negative impact on your mental performance.

Keep your brain sharp through memory games
Aside from addressing the root cause of your memory loss, you can sharpen your cognitive performance with the help of games. Dr. John Wesson Ashford explains that mentally stimulating activities can increase your attention, problem-solving, and logical skills, even in old age. Though learning a new language and taking music lessons can achieve the same outcome, games benefit your social life and stress levels.

There are many memory-boosting games that you can play in real life and online. One of these memory-boosting games is mahjong, wherein you must make matching sets and pairs of tiles to win. You can also boost your mental and social skills at the same time by downloading multiplayer Sudoku apps that allow you and your friends to solve a number puzzle together.

Memory loss is not just frustrating, but it can also affect the activities in your daily life. So apart from quitting bad habits, you can boost your memory by taking an Online Memory Test. This FDA-cleared test measures your cognitive function, speed, and accuracy to help you figure out how to optimize your memory skills.