You know the phenomenon where you walk into a room and then you can't remember what you walked into the room for? That's known as 'walking into the hereafter.' Because you walk in and you think, "Now what was I here after!?" You don't walk into the hereafter any more now than you did when you were seventeen, but you're more aware of it now when you do. Why? For one thing, you hear doctors say, "Vigilantly watch for short term memory loss, because if it starts happening more, you may need a check-up for Alzheimer's." We're hyper-aware, therefore, of every time we have a "hereafter" moment, and this fearful mindset about getting Alzheimer's disease in turn makes us notice even more every time it happens.

The other reason you may feel more forgetful, even though you're not, comes from the power of negative thinking. Many people create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in which they subconsciously create their own forgetfulness, actually starting to forget more because they believe aging will make them forget more often.

Six Steps to Sharpen Mental Function

As with sports, having a good memory is a matter of conditioning, commitment, and positive thinking. When you realize that you create the notions that your mental faculties decrease and you grow less effective as you age, then you have the power to change that idea. Once you've accepted that, you can keep your brain in top shape as you age by taking the following steps:

1. Remember: forgetting is no big deal

Because the language you use has been proven to become your reality, choose positive self-talk. You can convince yourself that anything is possible just as easily as you can talk yourself into believing that something is impossible when it's really not. Don't use language that makes a catastrophe of something that's really not a big deal. When you lose your keys for five minutes, for example, don't tell yourself, "Oh my God! I obviously have Alzheimer's!" when really you just lost your keys, a meaningless and common phenomenon you'd not have thought twice about a few years before.

2. Maintain a positive attitude…within reason

Zig Ziglar has famously said that a positive attitude will not help you do anything that you want to do. A positive attitude will not magically transform the talentless into superstars, nor will it make basketball great Shaquille O'Neal into a good horse jockey. But a positive attitude will help you do everything better than a negative attitude will.

3. Make little changes for a big difference

Remove the words "forget" and "forgot" from your vocabulary. Instead of saying, "I forgot her name," try saying, "I can't recall her name right now." It may sound like a silly little change, but you're actually re-training your brain. When you say, "I forgot," your brain processes, "Oh, I'm old and getting stupider by the second." But when you say, "I can't recall," you cut yourself and your brain some slack, making it much easier to recall the information later. This perception change will have an immediate effect on your ability to recall the information you're seeking.