It's happened to just about everyone: You try to remember what happened last week, your Netflix password, your grocery list, where you parked your car or the name of that guy you see at the coffee shop — and just draw a blank.

Memories can be tougher to access with time and age. It's perfectly normal and not necessarily indicative of disease or illness, but it can still be unsettling. However, there are things you can do right now to make yourself more resistant to forgetting.

As a Harvard-trained neuroscientist with more than 20 years of experience, when people ask how they can enhance their ability to remember, I like to share these strategies with them. Here are my most commonly used memory tricks. 

1. See it

When you create a mental image of what you're trying to remember, you add more neural connections to it. You're deepening the associations, making the formation of that memory more robust, so you'll better remember later. 

If you're writing down something that you want to remember, write it in all caps, highlight it in pink marker or circle it. Add a chart or doodle a picture. Make what you're trying to remember something you can easily see in your mind's eye

2. Use your imagination

People with the best memories have the best imaginations. To help make a memory unforgettable, use creative imagery. Go beyond the obvious and attach bizarre, surprising, vivid, funny, physically impossible and interactive elements to what you're trying to remember, and it will stick. 

For example, if I need to remember to pick up chocolate milk at the grocery store, for example, I might imagine Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson milking a chocolate brown cow in my living room. 

3. Make it about you

I rarely endorse self-centeredness, but I make an exception when it comes to enhancing your memory. You are more likely to remember a detail about yourself or something that you did, than you are to retain a detail about someone else or something someone else did.

So make what you're learning unique to you. Associate it with your personal history and opinions, and you'll strengthen your memory.

4. Look for the drama

Experiences drenched in emotion or surprise tend to be remembered: successes, humiliations, failures, weddings, births, divorces, deaths.

Emotion and surprise activate your amygdala, which then sends a loud and clear message to your hippocampus: "Hey! What is going on right now is extremely important. Remember this!" 

5. Practice makes perfect

Repetition and rehearsal strengthen memories. Quizzing yourself enhances your memory for the material far better than simply rereading it.

Muscle memories become stronger and are more efficiently retrieved the more you rehearse a skill. Because these memories tell the body what to do, your body gets better at doing these physical tasks with practice.

6. Use plenty of retrieval cues

Cues are crucial for retrieving memories. The right cue can trigger the memory of something you haven't thought of in decades. Cues can be anything associated with what you're trying to remember — the time of day, a pillbox, concert tickets by the front door, a Taylor Swift song, the smell of Tide detergent. 

Smells are especially powerful memory cues because your olfactory bulb, where smells are perceived (you smell in your brain, not your nose), sends strong neural inputs to the amygdala and the hippocampus, the parts of your brain that consolidate memories.

7. Externalize your memory

People with the best memories for what they intend to do later use aids like lists, pillboxes, calendars, sticky notes, and other reminders.

You might be worried that this is somehow cheating or that you'll worsen your memory's capabilities if you rely too much on these external "crutches" instead of using your brain. Our brains aren't designed to remember to do things later. Write them down.

Here are a few other helpful reminders:

• Context matters. Memory retrieval is far easier and faster when the internal and external conditions match whatever they were when that memory was formed. Your learning circumstances matter, too. For example, if you like to drink a mocha Frappuccino while studying for a test, have another one when you take the exam to get your brain back into that mindset.
  
• It helps to chill out. Chronic stress is nothing but bad news for our ability to remember. In addition to making you more vulnerable to a whole host of diseases, it impairs memory and shrinks your hippocampus.
  
  While we can't necessarily free ourselves from the stress in our lives, we can change how we react to it. Through yoga, meditation, exercise, and practices in mindfulness, gratitude and compassion, we can train our brains to become less reactive, put the brakes on the runaway stress response, and stay healthy in the face of chronic, toxic stress.

• And to get enough sleep. You need seven to nine hours of sleep to optimally consolidate the new memories you created today. If you don't get enough sleep, you'll go through the next day experiencing a form of amnesia. Some of your memories from yesterday might be fuzzy, inaccurate or even missing. 
  
  Getting enough sleep is critical for locking whatever you have learned and experienced in your long-term memory, and it reduces your risk of developing Alzheimer's.

Lisa Genova is a neuroscientist New York Times bestselling author of "Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting." Lisa graduated valedictorian from Bates College with a degree in biopsychology and holds a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard University. She travels worldwide speaking about brain health, memory and neurological diseases and has appeared on PBS, NBC, CNN and NPR. Her first TED talk, "What You Can Do To Prevent Alzheimer's" has been viewed over eight million times.

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This is an adapted excerpt from "Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting," by Lisa Genova, published by Harmony. Copyright © 2021 by Lisa Genova.