Are you considering retirement village living? It turns out that living in a retirement village isn’t only great for your social life, but can also help improve your memory.
As we age, we all experience memory changes. Research shows that our ability to focus and pay attention is reduced over time, and it’s not as easy to filter out distractions. This can lead to losing one’s train of thought while, say, stepping out of the shower or opening the fridge. Distractions are what cause the very common phenomenon of walking into a room and then forgetting what it was you came in there to do.
Here’s how moving to a retirement village can help you improve your memory:
- Better nutrition and enjoyable exercise. Improved nutrition and getting enough exercise are key to maintaining or improving our memories. Many of these retirement villages offer restaurants, bistros, on-site nutrition experts, gyms, and fitness programs to help your mind and body stay sharp.
- Access to new skills and classes. Choose a retirement village that offers many social amenities, including workshops and classes, and you could see a real boost in your memory. Learning new skills can help our brains make new connections. Study after study continues to show that testing our minds through puzzles, games, learning new languages, or introducing new skills is the best way to retain our memory. Choose activities that are fun, challenging, and rewarding.
- Specialized support. If you look for a continuing care community – which offers care for older adults at every stage of their lives – you may also have access to specialized memory care. While this type of care is usually reserved for those with more severe memory problems, you can rest assured that should your memory issues progress, you have a support team in place to help with exercises and strategies to maintain or improve your memory if possible.
- Organization and routine. Managing a household on your own can be stressful. But a move to a retirement village can help you stay more focused and organized. Restaurants on campus generally serve meals at set times. Activities have regular schedules, and other amenities are easy to find and operate according to strict hours. Life can be much simpler when you downsize, put everything in its place, and no longer have to worry about home maintenance.
