July 9, 2025
An easy-to-do recall exercise before you go to bed may enhance memory in older adults, according to a new report. The small study found that the exercise, which only requires a few minutes before you go to sleep, boosted memory scores on a verbal recall test in older adults, including those in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
The exercise is simple: Before you go to bed at night, think about five events or activities that happened to you that day and, if possible, write them down. The autobiographical events can be as simple as “We took a nice walk in the park,” “I baked brownies for dessert, and everyone loved them,” or “My sister called and we had a nice chat.”
For the study, researchers from the University of Bristol in England looked at 26 older adults whose average age was around 69. Eight of them had Alzheimer’s disease or mild cognitive impairment, a serious form of memory loss that may progress to full-blown Alzheimer’s; the remaining participants, who served as controls, were of similar age and general physical health but did not have serious memory problems. All were part of an ongoing study of the effects of sleep on Alzheimer’s risk called the RESTED-AD Study, for Remote Evaluation of Sleep To enhance understanding in Early Dementia.
The participants were randomly assigned to complete a word recall test. The test involved watching a video between 5 and 6 o’clock in the evening that highlighted 20 common words to memorize. Examples of the words used included noodle, cave, helmet, cattle, spire, archery, marble, chestnut and volcano. The video provided visual and audio cues to emphasize the words. To further enhance learning, participants were asked to identify whether a word represented something that was “alive” or “not alive.” After watching the video, participants were also asked to recite the new words they’d learned.
Then, at 9 to 10 the next morning, participants were asked to recall the 20 words from the evening before. They were also presented with a list of 40 words, which included the original words from the previous evening along with 20 additional words that were meant to serve as distractions, such as animal, soup, hawk, movie, collar, rattle and mountain. Participants were then asked to distinguish the words from the previous day’s recall test.
The study participants completed this word recall test on two separate occasions. But in some instances, they were randomly assigned to complete the bedtime autobiographical recall exercise, in which they wrote down five things that happened to them that day, before going to bed.
The researchers found that doing the bedtime autobiographical test boosted memory scores the next morning. Those who wrote down just five things that had happened to them that day could identify more of the 20 words they were asked to remember the previous evening. Documenting their daily experiences at bedtime appeared to enhance memory function the following day.
“On the nights when participants wrote down events from the day, both the people with Alzheimer’s disease and healthy older adults did better in the memory task, with the Alzheimer’s group benefitting even more,” said study author Jonathan Blackman. While the study was small and more research is needed to confirm the findings, the bedtime exercise “holds promise as a drug-free intervention to enhance memory performance in healthy older adults and those with mild cognitive impairment or dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. The findings were published in the journal Neuropsychologia.
The bedtime exercise is free of cost, easy to implement and, unlike current medications to treat Alzheimer’s, free of serious side effects. “If we can show that these study results are repeated and replicated,” Dr. Blackman concluded, “we think that this could be an easily adopted intervention that could have a meaningful effect on memory.”
By ALZinfo.org, The Alzheimer’s Information Site. Reviewed by Eric Schmidt, Ph.D., Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation at The Rockefeller University.
Source: J. Blackman, V. Gabb, W. Woodstoke, et al: “A new behavioural intervention to enhance memory in older people – evening autobiographical recall.” Neuropsychologia, June 19, 2025
