If you’re running a business, you constantly have a lot of things on your mind. It’s easy to forget things from one minute to the next.

They warn you to use a unique password for this crucial online service, and so you do. But then you can’t remember what it was.

You meet a bunch of fascinating people at a networking event. “Please call my assistant and get my calendar,” one of them tells you. “We’d really like to pursue this.” But hours later, you’re asking yourself, “Wait, which one was she?”

You realize it’s very important that a member of your team understands a specific task. You rehearse what you’ll say to drive it home. Afterward, he misses it — and you can’t remember if you actually told him or simply planned to.

We can all come up with a zillion examples. That’s part of why I keep an eye out for stories about things that neuroscience says you can do to improve your memory — or at least reduce the chances of it deteriorating as you get older.

I also have to acknowledge that I’m more likely to do things if they’re simple. Fortunately, over the past year or so, I’ve come across quite a few examples, including several that simply involve lying down. Here’s a quick survey:

Don’t accumulate a sleep debt

Writing in the journal Trends in Neurosciences, University of Pennsylvania researchers tried to synthesize conclusions from decades of research on sleep deprivation and sleep debts. They reached three conclusions:

Accumulating a sleep debt led to “deficits ... in vigilance and episodic memory” that persisted even after subjects attempted to make up for a short night’s sleep by sleeping longer on subsequent days.

People are unreliable witnesses when you ask them if they’ve slept enough. One of the first things to go when you accumulate a sleep debt is your objective perception of just how you’re affected by the lack of sleep.

Finally, and the biggest issue for the long term, persistent sleep debts, even when subjects attempted to make up for them, were associated with “heightened susceptibility to neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease ... and Parkinson’s disease.”

Wear an eye mask when you sleep

Researchers in Italy, Wales and the United States teamed up to run two experiments involving 122 human participants. Then they wrote about their findings in the journal Sleep.

In one experiment, they compared the experiences of people who wore eye masks at night with those who did not. They found that those who wore masks demonstrated better episodic memory and alertness, and sustained attention, than those without masks.

In the second experiment, they had participants wear eye masks for two nights — and then follow up by wearing eye masks with holes cut out to allow light. (This was intended to account for any discomfort they might have had from wearing masks to begin with.)

In short, the ones wearing real masks (without the holes cut out) did better on cognitive tests, even though they said they didn’t feel as if they’d slept better.

Sleep on your side

This one is a bit less connected to immediate short-term memory, but everyone I’ve shared it with has decided to try it.

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Translational Neurodegeneration, Australian researchers set out to study devastating motor neuron diseases like ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Their experiments involved mice, and an attempt to determine whether problems with the glymphatic system, which is what removes waste materials from the brain, might be associated with the onset of this kind of disease.

They studied this by feeding the mice food that had been genetically modified to include a human protein often seen in ALS patients, and then also giving some of the mice antibiotics that counteracted the protein.

Mice whose glymphatic systems had been unable to remove the protein were more likely to show “classical signs of ALS, including progressive muscle impairments and brain atrophy.”

The researchers also cited other behaviors likely to increase glymphatic clearance from previous research; among them, sleeping on your side.

“The reasons for this are not yet fully understood,” study author David Wright wrote in a popular article that accompanied the research, “but possibly relates to the effects of gravity, compression and stretching of tissue.”

Simple doesn’t mean easy

I admit, since reading these studies, I wear a sleep mask and I sleep on my side. In fairness, I was probably inclined to do both of these things anyway, but I’m more conscious of them now. As for not accumulating a sleep debt, let’s just say it’s a work in progress.